The blue dress was 'burned' a long time ago, and Monica Lewinsky decided to tell her story for the first and last time after 23 years: 'Those were dark times'

‘When you make such a fatal mistake at the beginning of your life as I did, because of which you lose so much, any new idea of ​​a new mistake is catastrophic, and yet, to move on, you have to take a risk. I have to try new things and I have to find out who I really am ', said 47-year-old Monica Lewinsky.

Unfortunately, for the rest of her life, she will remain the woman who rocked the political career of then-President Bill Clinton. Clinton, then 49, and Monica Lewinsky, a 22-year-old White House intern, were involved in the political sex scandal, which lasted from 1995 to 1997.

Perhaps all would not have had such an echo had Clinton not ended his speech on television in late January 1998 with the words that ‘he had no sexual relations with ‘that' woman’.

Further investigation led to Bill Clinton being charged with perjury but also being recalled in 1998 in the U.S. House of Representatives. He was subsequently acquitted of all charges, and it was Lewinsky who went through the worst because the public condemned her.

It was only a matter of time before she would agree to tell her story for Hollywood. One meeting at a party with Ryan Murphy was crucial, especially after he told her, 'You're the only one who should tell the story, no one should do it for you.'

It was the anthological series ‘Impeachment’, which re-examines the events that led to Clinton’s recall through the eyes of the women involved, that was the right opportunity for Monica Lewinsky to prove herself to the world as a producer as well. In addition to her, the series mentions Linda Tripp, a friend who actually exposed her affair with the president to the public, Paula Jones, the woman who accused him of sexual abuse, as well as Hillary Clinton.

'I was aware that something like this would happen someday and if Murphy hadn't been in the game, he would have been someone else, but it's better when I can participate myself rather than stand aside in fear waiting to see what it will be about.'

Monica Lewinsky was only 22 years old when her relationship with the US president began and it lasted 18 months while she was working at the Oval Office, but also when she got a new job at the Pentagon. The plot of the series begins when everything went 'downhill' - on January 16, 1998, when the FBI jumped on it at the Pentagon.

‘It was the scariest day of my life,’ Lewinsky recalled, and at that moment she was actually naively waiting for her ‘friend’ Linda Tripp, not knowing that she had already handed over to the FBI for investigation more than 20 hours of their secretly recorded phone conversation. Monica spent the next 11 hours in a nearby hotel, where she was interrogated, and then she was threatened with 27 years in prison.

What happened later is well known to the public - a 160-page report submitted to Congress but also jokes about oral sex on the most-watched television shows. The young intern's dreams of becoming a forensic psychologist fell through, and the public treated her almost with disgust.

After all, Lewinsky did her best to break through and succeed, but for a long time, it was an impossible mission for her. She tried to launch a line of handbags, appeared in a reality show, and even moved to the other side of the world, and then was absent for almost a decade.

Everything actually started to change in 2014, when she wrote an open letter published at Vanity Fair in which she made it clear that it was time to ‘burn the beret and bury the famous blue dress’ and actually bring purpose to what was happening in the past. A year later, she participated in a TED talk panel in which she spoke about the public humiliation she had endured and actually told her side of the story at a time when the public was finally ready to hear it.

Since then, things have gotten better - she has become a spokesperson against abuse, and she has found herself in the production business and recently founded a production company. A documentary on public humiliation will soon see the light of day, but it is ‘Impeachment’ that is the most important item and chapter of her life that marks a new beginning.

Although all this had a positive outcome for her and today she is building a career, but she also has income at the expense of her life story, on the other hand, she had to sign a 'contract with the devil' which required her to remember once more and completely expose herself to cameras about the worst period of her life.

After a brief move to Oregon, she returned to Los Angeles and lived with her parents, looking for work and getting rejections. She spent time with friends, volunteering, and going to psychotherapy because she was diagnosed with PTSD after all of it. All this time, she turned down offers to make money on her life story - from television, through books and theater plays, to interviews.

All of this has led Monica to have absolutely nothing at the age of 40 - no residence, no source of income, no career, no family of her own. And while the whole world, including Clinton, moved on, Monica remained ‘frozen in time’.

This was exactly the reason why in 2005 she decided to start all over again and moved to London to graduate in social psychology. ‘I wanted a job, a husband, kids. I wanted them to treat me normally,' she admitted, but her past haunted her all the time.

The moment that changed her was the death of student Tyler Clementi in 2010 - he committed suicide after his roommate secretly filmed and posted on the internet the moment of his intimate sexual act with another man. Although she did not know him, in all this she recognized a part of herself and the influence of shame on the psyche. And then it all started and after a few years, she got the chance of a lifetime - to produce a series in which she would tell her story the best she knows.

23 years have passed since the scandal that marked her life, and her mother Marcia Lewis Straus still says that despite everything, Monica still remains the 'strong and persistent girl' who could always persuade her to all or nothing, but she changed approach to her life today and is much more careful and carefully preserves what she created.

Today, she finally has almost everything she dreamed of - she is financially independent for the first time in her life and fearlessly takes everything that life has to offer, but she still has to succeed in her private life. And in the near future, she is expecting another production, the documentary '15 Minutes of Shame ', which will be shown on HBO Max next month, and with Stacey Sher, she deals with the topic of public shame and sex. But most importantly, today she has no problem looking back and can laugh at some jokes, to which she once did not react well.

And how does it feel when she sees the Clintons in the media? ‘I don’t mind it in the least as it has been hard for me the last two decades of my life,’ Monica Lewinsky revealed, adding that she even voted for Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential election.

But the only thing she doesn't know is whether the public will ever stop talking about the event 23 years ago, even though today everything has a different meaning. What she hopes for is that she told her story for the last time.

By: Amber V. - Gossip Whispers